Soul searchers
Dark histories and singular heroines make for a lively read with these page-turners.
THE MIDNIGHT NEWS, by Jo Baker (Hachette, $37.99)
It’s London in 1940 and the Blitz has just begun. Charlotte Richmond, the 20-yearold daughter of a baronet, is doing her bit for the war effort in the Ministry of Information. Charlotte’s life is thrown into uproar when she starts losing friends to the bombs. She’s already lost her beloved brother, Eddie, in the early months of the war. But she doesn’t totally lose her dead friends’ company. They start talking to her, at times amusingly jostling for her attention. Charlotte notices that one man keeps popping up wherever she is and she begins to wonder if her friends are dying not because of the Blitz but because of her. So she starts investigating how they’ve died. One particularly suspicious mystery is the death of her beloved best friend, Elena, who looks untouched by any kind of explosion despite her mother’s insistence that she was killed by a bomb.
Charlotte shares her concerns with a young man, Tom, who she meets feeding the birds outside her office. Tom, whose disabilities make him unable to fight, is a clever psychology student whose father is an undertaker who might be able to help with Charlotte’s investigations. But before long, she asks one too many questions and is whisked off by her family to an asylum, where we learn she was earlier committed, aged 17. She knows she will have to use all her ingenuity to escape.
Throughout this heart-wrenching novel, class differences are always prominent. It’s something that clearly intrigues Baker, whose novel Longbourn looked at the Bennet household in Pride & Prejudice from the servants’ point of view. Class structures blurred in Britain during the war, when aristocratic young women from the Home Counties worked alongside East Enders.
The war has meant an escape for
Charlotte from her interfering family and she finds real support and closeness for the first time from those supposedly beneath her. Through Charlotte’s experiences, Baker also examines how mental health problems were treated in these times, especially by the upper classes. The mentally fragile were experimented on by doctors with the permission of their families, who were just happy to have them out of sight. A great story with a triumphant ending for a very dear heroine.
IN A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS, by Cecelia Ahern (HarperCollins, $35)
This novel introduces us to the extraordinary Alice Kelly, a Dublin girl who from the age of eight sees energies and moods in colours around people’s bodies.
It all begins for this anxious child when she sees alarming blues around her moody mother. This soon expands to other people, who at times inundate her with a blizzard of moods and hues. She finds she needs to wear sunglasses to protect herself from everyone’s emotions.
Alice goes off to a special school, where she makes close friends for the first time and excels. However, she’s stopped from going to university at 19 because she is the only sibling who can care for her wheelchair-bound mother. This time isn’t wasted, though, as she discovers she can read the energies coming from flowers and trees, too. She finally escapes to London, learning, through trial and error, to manage her condition with the help of a reiki-practising neighbour. Then one day, she meets a intriguing man who has no colours.
In a Thousand Different Ways is funny and poignant, appealing to anyone who looks at the world in a different way. Ahern gives us characters we become invested in, even the nasty ones. Alice’s beloved brother, Hugh, believes she has the real-life condition known as synaesthesia, but Ahern adds some extra intriguing elements. The author has said that everyone is panicking about climate change, but no one is paying attention to the crisis of our souls, the holes appearing in us, the bits you can’t see.
THE FIRE AND THE ROSE, by Robyn Cadwallader (Fourth Estate, $34.99)
The focus of Australian author Robyn Cadwallader’s latest novel is King Edward I’s persecution of Jews in England in the late 13th century. The setting is Lincoln, which had the second-largest Jewish population at the time. William the Conqueror had brought Jews over from France a couple of centuries before because they were adept financiers and could support his court. But Edward and his supporters are financially strapped and under pressure to repay their lenders. They turn on Jews in finance, taxing then imprisoning them, torturing and sometimes worse in the Tower of London. The wider Jewish communities are forced into poverty and made to wear cloth yellow-star badges. The king and his cronies are ably supported by the Church, which energetically incites parishioners to lash out at Jews, cooking up stories of evildoing to pit the population against them.
Eleanor, a young Christian woman, was forced from her village because she refused to marry, but thanks to an education from a monk and a nun, she has some unusual skills for a woman of her time and class. With a birthmark across her face and neck, few men will look at her, but her only desire is to find work as a scribe, writing documents and contracts.
Her life becomes complicated when she meets and falls in love with Asher, a Jewish man who runs a spice shop. He is less interested in being a money lender than he is in herbs and plants and their healing powers. Their relationship is an intense, sensory one, and it’s illegal. When Eleanor becomes pregnant, it’s not the Christian community that helps her but the Jewish one. As she and Asher struggle to visualise a life ahead, they find joy in the child, Hannah. Meanwhile, Eleanor’s uneasy friendship with a priest exposes her to a secret the Church would not want revealed.
Cadwallader easily transports the reader to the Lincoln of the time, the gossip, markets and communities. The author has the walls of the city speak during the novel, suggesting that the cruel words and acts of this time stay in the stones as silent witnesses.
A harrowing but excellent read of a fascinating, bloody time in history that shouldn’t be forgotten. ▮